Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The French Revolution

So here it is now, Bastille Day, the day on which I proposed the second part of my series indemnifying the liberal revolutionary thinking that is now a global cliché, and I've not yet even finished the first part. So it goes when one is too perfectionist a writer, I suppose.

But one may imagine I would laud France on this, her national feast, eh? Quite the contrary. Behold the true workings of liberté, égalité, et fraternité:

I am proudly of French heritage no doubt; how could one not be proud when one's ancestral nation is the Eldest Daughter of the Church, when one is a direct descendant of one of the siblings of the saintly Maid of Orléans? But France, while one of the mightiest nations on earth, fell prey to the empty promises of liberal revolutionaries, who stem from the rebel heresy of Protestantism (which had already committed one regicide, Charles I of England) and the philosophical errors of the Renaissance and the "Enlightenment." Both of these are premised on the rejection of the magisterial hermeneutical interpretations of both Scripture and patristic texts and the work of the classical philosophers which had defined Christendom, all in favour of amoral cynicism, of an anti-humanistic utilitarianism which they cloaked under the name of "humanism," of a preference for the return of such petty tyrants as Caligula and Nero over such Christian kings as Charlemagne and St. Louis IX. Christendom came from the ashes of the Roman Empire, no doubt, and for over a millennium, none would have dared go back to the days when martyrs were thrown to the lions. Until these Whigs, these Jacobins, these bloodthirsty heretics had the pipe dream that they might be able to cobble something together out of their own vain imaginations, and killed our society.

Now, we've lost our imagination, our literature, our arts, and even a decent sense of our humanity that this French Revolution has overrun the world. And our religion, which interjects the sacred into our everyday live, into our public life? Relegated to a merely private affair, on a par with any other religion or subculture or "lifestyle" movement.

Perhaps, though, my venom precedes my rationality. I'll instead speak of why I'm so venomous. My name, Palardy, originates from the Vendée, the province utterly obliterated by the revolutionaries. The Vendée rose against the revolutionary government upon the murder of King Louis XVI in 1793, after the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had removed loyal priests from the parishes and replaced them with glorified civil servants, and the army had begun to conscript young men to fight those foreign powers threatening to end the revolution by invasion. After the French Army was initially routed, the Vendéen peasants, discontent to submit to this new order, fled into the woods, and a brutal guerrilla insurrection began, and spread to nearby Brittany. The revolutionary army in the end thwarted it in ways too brutal even to mention, in which I'm absolutely certain that the "Rights of Man" that they praised to high heaven were completely honoured. Yeah, right.

And so always to anyone who prefers to be Catholic, to maintain that the social kingship of Christ will always trump the power of the state, to maintain their ancient traditions, and such. Modernity brought no real progress, only more misery. And only to bolster the power of a handful of cynical malcontents.